According to WSGF, changing defaultFOV is what matters if you want to change your FOV to fit widescreen (so that the widescreen view is essentially an true horizontally wider view rather than cutting off the vertical view). However, what's currentFOV, which is right above defaultFOV? When I try to put it to 106.29 (the true fov to achieve Hor+), it reverts back to 53.145 yet defaultFOV's value remains the same. Not to mention that in game I have to zoom once before to make the view wider (and yet it still looks cut off compared to the 4:3 screenshots of Tribes 2, which means it is still Vert-).

currentFOV is only used for the ZoomHud. The only relevant value you should be concerned with is defaultFOV.

defaultFOV = 90 is what is considered "normal" for 4:3 aspect ratio. Naturally if you switch to a 16:9 or 16:10 or 21:9 view you'll need to increase the defaultFOV for things to look "normal" in the wider ratios.

T2 should work in whatever resolutions and aspect ratios your driver reports, but there is a hardcoded limit of 120 FOV which isn't going to look "normal" across a triple monitor setup. You need a method of increasing this max, which can be done one of two ways.

My IFC22.DLL for T2 replaces the default and increases the maxFOV to 360 for all cameras (player, turret, vehicle, etc.). It does a few other things too which you may find useful.

ZoomHud is a UI element that is displayed when you press your "Zoom" key (L-Shift by default I think). You don't mess with currentFOV at all, it isn't something you should be editing because it will not affect non-zoomed FOV.

You can use the FOV calculator on WSGF to determine the equivalent horizontal FOV value to use for defaultFOV given any resolution and number of monitors as input.

For example, the "Optional fields" default to 1024x768 (4:3), old hFOV of 90 degrees.In the "Required fields" section the default Resolution of single monitor is 1920x1080 (16:9).

For a single monitor you'd change the Across field to 1 (instead of 3) and the calculator will inform you that 106.26 is the New hFOV. That would be what you'd want to use as defaultFOV in Tribes 2 to have the same vertical FOV and everything appear as "normal" as it would at 4:3 and 90.

If you played on a 1920x1200 screen, the hFOV would be 100.39 and if you had this monitor (2560x1080) you'd need 121.28, and a patch (my IFC22 or the memPatch).

The game still starts in 90 FOV, and I still have to zoom in once to get 106.26. Is it unfixable?

Use a script. Uber FOV is good but a bit overkill for my purposes. I use an updated version of spawn-fix.cs that I fixed to set the FOV after spawn faster than the default 1500 ms. I set it to 150, which is the minimum I could get out of it before it started messing up. Install in gamedata/base/scripts/autoexec